Dominga Sotomayor: “Tarde para morir joven shows the feeling of a new beginning”

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Tarde para morir joven is the third feature film by Chilean director Dominga Sotomayor.

With this film she takes up the exploration of the memory from her own experiences that already appeared in her debut film De jueves a domingo (2012), this time using more specific historical and time points.

The film shows the vital transition of a teenager in Chile in 1989, which at that time was loosing sight of Pinochet’s dictatorship and embracing the arrival of democracy enthusiastically. Despite this, Sotomayor says that her point of departure was "the sensation of a new beginning" in a rural context "far from politics." Her main motivation was to do something about "the adolescence of that particular moment", which at the same time "could be any summer." She stated that she did not want to show an "obvious" feeling of temporary location, but rather of "nostalgia", because "when I write I am already thinking of images" before beginning to develop the narrative aspect.

In this case, the title Tarde para morir joven (Too Late to Die Young) was "the first thing she had in mind" to define that sought-after feeling of "something that we can not recover." In the case of the protagonist, Sofía (Demian Hernández), it was "the pain of leaving childhood behind." Unlike her debut, that she describes as "a film full of rules", Sotomayor defines this new work as a film made "with absolute freedom, many characters and external locations." She explained that she focused "on an autobiographical place" that she wanted to recreate "in a very precise way", because the difference between "seeing that place inhabited and seeing people inhabiting it" mattered to her. Because of that sense of belonging and other reasons, the film process meant "a transition" for its director and for the young people who worked with her.

The filming has been financed thanks to Cinestación, a small filmmaking cooperative, with Brazilian, Argentine and Dutch funds. It was the only way of doing it, despite the good moment of Chilean cinema, that Sotomayor considers "very expansive, but at the same time away from the audience" because "many films are made per year, but the audience is the same for all." She regretted missing "a dialogue" with the audience of her own country, although the presence in festivals helps to fulfil this desire. Finally she faced the future of this situation, which she considers reversible, with optimism, because she believes "in cinema, in the experience of the screening room" and in "people with ability to do things."